It starts early, playing soldiers. As The Men They Couldn't Hang point out in Tiny Soldiers, (of an age before Call Of Duty): 'the perfect present for a birthday/Or the season of peace and goodwill/Is a toy battlefield or a sword and a shield/Or a book about people who kill'. So, when faced with a choice between life on a dead-end estate and a life with a possible dead-end, it's not difficult to persuade young lads to fight for Queen (or, as in the case of Spirit of the Falklands by New Model Army, Thatcher) and Country. They'd die if they only had something to die for.

Now, once you're in the army, you get trained. It's a process that requires the individual to be shaped to meet the needs of the collective whole and can become a Bloodsport for All, according to Carter USM. The de-humanisation may be necessary for the operation of an efficient fighting machine but it can be counter-productive in some situations: in post-invasion Iraq, for example, as Rise Against describe in Hero of War.

When the fighting does begin, I imagine it feels like Sabbat's Hosanna in Excelsis, in which Satan's army is 'cleansing the world with destruction and war' to the sound of a heavy thrash metal band: noisy, frightening and relentless. I'd surrender.

No matter where the soldier finds himself – in the battlefield or the barracks – communication with those at home is a vital thread of army life. In his Letters Home from the Garden of Stone, Everlast contemplates the 'job that he's got to do', alongside sending love to his family. Female companionship is inevitably another problem for (heterosexual male) soldiers. Camp followers once satisfied their 'domestic needs' (as it was described so delicately in the blog) and, in 1917, Emmylou Harris provides the voice of a French whore from World War I describing her liaisons with a soldier from the trenches, on whose haggard face she paints a gallant smile.

Humour – often cut down directly from the gallows – is also a mainstay of army life. The troops in World War I came up with Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire to keep their spirits up, describing the all-important hierarchy of the army with their place in it being full of short straws. Chumbawamba sing their words, plain and simple. But sometimes the awfulness of the situation just becomes the bitter remnant of a joke or an acrid pun like Hell Broke Luce. Tom Waits delivers the message as only he can.

Philip Jeays was inspired by Jacques Brel's song, La Statue, to write The Soldier. The 'useless lump of stone' war memorial responds to the grateful sentiment that erected it. But it's a song from the ungrateful dead, who died 'just because I died'.

We should end this with a bugler playing The Last Post or Taps but you may need cheering up instead. So here's a wonderful fantasy of a bugler getting the army to swing, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, swung by The Andrews Sisters (I hope they protected him from the malign intentions of Carter USM earlier). It was recorded for the Abbott and Costello film Buck Privates, a full year before the USA entered WWII and reality struck.

PS. UK Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove said recently that "Every child can benefit from the values of a military ethos". In the Exploited's song, Army Life, ex-soldier Wattie Buchan sang that "all I learned in the long years is/You gotta do whatever the army says". Discuss.